From Les Indes rouges (1973) to The Will To See (2020), Bangladesh remains close to the heart of Bernard-Henri Lévy. The only Muslim country led today by a woman is a model of tolerant Islam, sheltering a million Rohingya refugees driven out of Burma by the military junta. About this country at the mercy of climate change and western consumerism Lévy declared after his 2020 visit that it was “on the front line of the battle against radical Islam, poverty, migratory chaos, and ecological cataclysm.”

On February 2014, Bernard-Henri Lévy delivers a speech on the thronged central square known as the Maidan, occupied around the clock by the people of Kiev. It is the beginning of an ongoing struggle for the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian’s “fellow Europeans.” Despite, or perhaps because of, the defeatists inclined to accept the aggressions of Putin’s Russia, Lévy covers all 450 kilometers of the front line across which the defenders of democracy and of Europe face off against pro-Russian separatists.

In 1992, Bernard-Henri Lévy and his team are the first internationals to enter a city besieged by Slobodan Milosevic’s Serb militias. Lévy decries the ethnic cleansing eating at the heart of Europe. And from that moment on he never ceases to plead the Bosnian cause or to condemn the indifference of the European Union to that cause. It is in Bosnia that he chooses to launch his campaign against the rising tide of nationalism in the run-up to the European elections of 2019.

From Peshmerga to The Battle of Mosul, from The Empire and the Five Kings to Another Idea of the World, Bernard-Henri Lévy has never ceased to plead the cause of the Kurds, a long-suffering people repeatedly abandoned by their western allies. To the Kurds who fought ISIS and count the mountains as their only friends, Lévy promises : “I will stand by your side until the day I die.”

Described here are eight trips to Afghanistan made by a French writer over a period of 40 years, the country and its unceasing tragedy ever in his heart. The abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban is considered a wound and a stain by countless humanitarians, academics, archaeologists, soldiers, diplomats, and ordinary citizens, as it is for all lovers of liberty. But the fight goes on. Yesterday with the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud; today with his son, the new Lion of Panjshir.

Unfailingly present whenever Israel is in danger, Bernard-Henri Lévy has rolled up his sleeves since the 1970s to find peaceful solutions. But when the philosopher thinks about Israel, he is also thinking about the entire world. And when he becomes involved in Bosnia, Georgia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, or Afghanistan that involvement reflects his thinking about Israel. The post-Holocaust principle of “Never Again” inhabits his words and deeds with respect to Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.